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"Tough-minded
reporting on the failed war on drugs"

A Narco News Global Alert

Dutch TV
Footage:

On
Saturday, December 30th, Holland's TV News Program "Nova"
Showed Video of US-Funded Herbicide Spraying in the town of Ponte,
Colombia.

The crop duster, however, was not spraying
coca fields.

The video reveals repeated spraying over
a forest stream that is the water supply for a village of Inago
Indians, causing illness and skin blisters in young children
and eliminating food and medicine plants.

The
Colombian Government Denies the Spraying

The
Video Tells the Truth

"Plan Colombia"
Includes Biological Warfare, not to Eradicate Coca, but
to Clear the Native People Out of the Region

"Even now, eradicating
for five or six years in Colombia, and the coca crop continues
to grow. No one outside of Washington believes in the war on
drugs. I think that this war with the guerrillas is going to
fail. I hate to see my country get into another failed war such
as Vietnam or Central America."

-- Former
US Ambassador Robert White, quoted by Nova

To see the footage that disproves
the claims of Washington and Bogotá, click
the Nova program and then click "Zaterdag"
(Saturday) in the section titled "Afgelopen Week"

The program, in the Dutch language,
is available on either Realplayer or Windows Media Player

The section on Colombia begins
13 minutes and 30 seconds into the half-hour program

In Mexico,
drug crimes are exclusively federal charges

President Vicente Fox
holds their freedom in his hands

A Holiday Season Report
and Editorial

And Thanks
to Our Litigious Newsmakers...

It's
a libel action with all the elements of a political thriller.
Two left-wing publishers use the Internet to accuse a powerful
Mexican banker of pushing cocaine from
his Caribbean beachfront-and the banker hires Vernon Jordan's
law firm to sue for libel in New York. Turning the tables, the
defendants hire top First Amendment lawyers and prepare to put
the drug war on trial in the media capital of the world...

"Everything I have printed
I know to be true and I have documented with the facts,"
says Al Giordano, publisher of The Narco News Bulletin, a Web
site that covers the drug war in Latin America (www.narconews.com).
My friend Giordano, a former political reporter for the Boston
Phoenix, has never been sued for libel before; indeed, he's usually
the one making the accusations. This past October, an
AP correspondent resigned after Narco News caught the reporter
lobbying the Bolivian government on behalf of a private company.

The other defendant is Mario
Renato Menéndez Rodriguez, editor and publisher of
Por Esto!, a daily newspaper with a paid circulation of about
70,000 on the Yucatán peninsula. Menéndez says
he has eyewitness testimony, documents, and photos to back up
his allegations that Hernández has turned miles of once-pristine
beachfront into an outpost for the drug trade. The publisher
is outraged by what he calls the banker's attempt "to destroy
me economically, politically, and professionally."

...Giordano sees the case as
a golden opportunity to exercise his skills as a pro se defender,
if he so chooses. "I'm looking forward to deposing Hernández,"
he says. "In the long run, this will be an educational process
for the public that will reveal information about the atrocity
of the drug war and how it's being waged by the U.S. government
and its friends in Latin America."

The day after
the VOICE story, Akin Gump's McLish suddenly "not authorized
to speak to the press" by client Banamex, according to Metroland
newspaper report by Larry Goodwin:

And...

"Giordano
is one of the few heroes in journalism these days. He gave up
his newspaper job in the U.S., went to Mexico and taught himself
Spanish. Then, he started publishing Narco News, one of the most
damning news outlets I've ever seen..." - Media Critic Ken
Layne